And I can’t agree with Luke Akehurst that Gordon Brown doesn’t deserve this: he absolutely deserves this. His knifing of Blair was undemocratic, clandestine and completely reprehensible. His failure over 10 years and more to support allies and colleagues in difficulty was despicable. I give you, Harriet Harman’s battle with Frank Field, his silence over the fuel protests and the astonishing notion put about that he didn’t support the Iraq war but remained in cabinet. Look only over the last week at the way he has treated Alastair Darling.

But I don’t support the coup. This is not an honest, noble cause. There is no disagreement over policy. Gordon Brown is not a changed man as prime minister. It’s an electoral calculation about limiting the damage at the next election and it’s one in which the means destroys the ends. Yes, if we had another leader we would do better at the next election. But removing Brown now, against his will removes any authority the party has left.

I was moved to tears last night when my wife came back from canvassing, on her own, in a marginal ward, to find that another Cabinet minister had resigned (followed by a troop of politicians to the TV studios: why were they in central London rather than in their constituencies?) Whatever cack-handed, school-boy antics are going on (did you read the farcical hotmail coup story in The Guardian) they are destroying the party. The actions of the leaders of our party create a water cannon affect on Labour members going out campaigning. They ruin our credibility in the eyes of ordinary people. They destroy our ability to govern the country. And we will serve our punishment for a long, long time.

As Tony Blair said: “If we can’t beat this lot, we don’t serve to be in power.” Quite.

Related posts:

1. Voting Labour with a heavy heart

• “cynical and corrosive commentary”
• “you don’t get very far in politics without guts, and certainly not as far as the cabinet table”
• “wielding great influence without accountability”
• “more people debating, engaging and voting; not more people waving placards on the sidelines.”

In short, she argued that it’s better to compromise some views to get more done than sit on the outside sniping, intellectually and moralyl uncompromised but never achieving anything.

Therefore, for Monbiot to criticise her for voting with the government (of which she is a member) is simplistic, easy and cheap. Simplistic because any minister can be criticised on those grounds. Easy, because he knows nothing of any personal, private compromises she may have had to make and cheap because any honest reply from her would create a media firestorm.

There are many reasons to criticise Hazel Blears, legitimately. I don’t, for example, agree that politics isn’t better off for what Monbiot does and what Hazel Blears does. Certainly a political and private realm without any public realm would be a space for which demagogues could take advantage .

There’s an important debate about the credibility of collective responsibility in a new media age. This, George, wasn’t the way to start it.

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